Towards autonomous robot swarms for multi-target localisation and monitoring with applications to counter IED operations

Abstract

A swarm robotics approach is adopted in designing a fully autonomous multi-robot-based solution to the problem of locating generic targets within a given search space. A proof of concept system is developed and tested within a 3D simulation environment. A series of laboratory experiments are carried out to assess the performance of the system with respect to the given task of localising and monitoring generic targets, with reference to a counter IED scenario. Further experiments are carried out to evaluate the robustness to robot failure and scalability of the system.